Apple Computer Inc continues to get the benefit of the fastest chips falling off IBM Corp’s production lines and the company has three new Workgroup servers: the 6150/66, 8150/110 and 8150/120 (CI No 2,637). The 8150/120 is the first commercial machine to appear with a 120MHz 601 processor. The machines, available in the US next month, cost between $2,550 and $8,710. Existing 8150 and 9150 owners should be able to get upgrades from May. Apple has accompanied the hardware with a major new release of its Appleshare Server software. The company says the software runs, on average, 75% faster than the previous version 4.0.2, and the combination of hardware and software upgrades means the new 6150, 8150 and 9150 run 90% faster than their predecessors. Though Apple’s official announcement said that the new software is designed specifically for the advanced PowerPC processor, a spokesman said there was little significant new native software in the heart of the product. Instead, a large proportion of the improved performance is ascribed to things such as a swish new read-ahead and write-behind caching scheme, built into the client and a new server desktop database cache. While the new caching extensions are apparently native, a wholesale revamp of Appleshare, incorporating more native code, probably will not appear until new Peripheral Component Interconnect-based servers arrive.
